Fugard masters the code - Athol Fugard Issue

Gerald Weales

MORRIS: It's difficult to play something you haven't seen.

(The Blood Knot 64)

"Critics are poisonous snakes," Athol Fugard told William B. Collins in 1982, placing a comforting hand on his arm: "you just need to be bitten once and you develop an anti-venom in your system" ("On Stage").(1) If I had read such a statement fifteen years ago I might have hesitated to send the playwright a copy of my earlier Hollins Critic essay on his work, but his response was amiable (perhaps the anti-venom was working), even when he reaffirmed his faith in Dimetos, a discussion of which had brought my celebratory article to a sadly muted finish. "I am confident that it will prove itself with time," he wrote. If so, its time has not yet come, since Dimetos must be Fugard's least produced play. I bring up this ancient critical history not to applaud my fifteen-year-old response and not--not simply, in any case--to make a bridge between this essay and my earlier one. Not even to initiate a new consideration of Dimetos, except to indicate certain things about it that mark it as an anomaly in his work.

"My other work has been spawned by people, incidents, or images I knew rather than by something I read," Fugard told Russell Vandenbroucke (149), commenting on the passage from Albert Camus' Carnets which haunted him from 1961 until 1975, when he exorcised it by writing Dimetos. Recording his acceptance of a commission from the Edinburgh Festival in February of 1975, he said he had "decided finally to take up the idea of Dimetos" (Notebooks 215). "Idea," as his notebooks often indicate, is a word that bedeviled Fugard as playwright. "Boesman's hatred and abuse of Lena," he wrote in a notebook entry dated July 4, 1968, quoted in the introduction to Three Port Elizabeth Plays: "Easy enough to formulate this as an 'idea' but a struggle to reveal the full carnal reality of it in incident and dialogue" (xx).(2) When he was first working with the characters who would eventually appear in A Lesson from Aloes, he wrote, "I need to locate Piet, Gladys and Steve in a world of real things, not ideas," and when he discarded--or thought he did--the work the next month, he explained, "Cart before my horse--consciously evolved my 'idea' and then tried to embody it in a place, a time, a man. It is no good, I just don't work like that" (Notebooks 140, 143). His method in Dimetos was even less characteristic. There he tried to embody the idea in a man, but one who lived in no recognizable place, no identifiable time. Still working with the play after its first production at Edinburgh, he indicated that he was thinking of the time of the play "without letting any specifics creep onto the page" but that he had "two specific settings in my imagination" (Notebooks 219). Working tools, presumably, for they never moved from his imagination to the stage. Certainly the New Bethesda that became the "remote province" of Act One of Dimetos (4) has none of the substantiality of the New Bethesda outside Miss Helen's door in The Road to Mecca.

Dimetos is one of only three plays that Fugard set outside of South Africa. The Drummer, the five-minute mime piece he wrote for the Actors Theatre of Louisville in 1980, grew out of an image he found in New York--a derelict playing with drumsticks--but it is set not in New York or any American urban city but, as all mimes are, in the performance space where the action takes place. A Place with the Pigs ostensibly began with a newspaper story about a Russian deserter, but the pigsty setting, despite an occasional word or two ("cabbage soup and dumplings" [79], for instance), is in a village that is not in Russia but, according to the play's stage directions, "somewhere in the author's imagination" (53). Most of Fugard's work belongs to South Africa. The rain of place names that falls on us as we watch--listen to--Fugard's plays is not evidence of regionalism. They give a geographical reality in which his characters can find their emotional truth and their stories can be told, and although we may not know Cradock from Noupoort--to use two of the traveling amusement-park stops in Playland--we have no trouble recognizing them and recognizing ourselves in Gideon and Martinus, as in Morrie and Zach, Boesman and Lena, Hally and Sam. The physical landscape, its flora and fauna, is more difficult to take in. Oddly, while Fugard was creating the deracinated landscape of Dimetos, he was working on The Guest (1976), "An episode in the life of Eugene Marais," which, despite the artificiality of the voice-over quotations from Marais, lets the audience actually see the land. This film and the other one Fugard made with Ross Devenish--Marigolds in August (1979)--let the camera show not only the land but its nonhuman inhabitants which mean so much to the playwright (the snake, the pipit nest, even Marais's baboons in The Guest; the monkey, the turtle, the cobra in Marigolds).(3) Otherwise audiences have to depend on words to create landscape, and words are slippery things. Descriptions in the theater have as much to do with the describer as with the described. Consider the very different versions of the Karoo that one gets from Elsa in The Road to Mecca, after her grueling drive from Johannesburg to New Bethesda, and from Mr. M, remembering his childhood vision at Wapadsberg Pass in My Children! My Africa!

"A man's scenery is other men," Fugard wrote in November 1966 (Notebooks 141), contemplating the final image of the Piet-Gladys-Steve story that would become A Lesson from Aloes in 1978. The men and women on Fugard's human landscape are necessarily South African. "I stand on a street in Port Elizabeth or Johannesburg or a small South African town, and in terms of the life that passes me I've mastered the code," he told Mel Gussow, and he gives a sample portrait of a black woman carrying shopping bags. "If I stood on a corner in London or New York, I couldn't put that sort of biography behind any of the people walking past me. Mastering the code of a place has been necessary to me as a writer" (51). The three characters in Aloes--distantly based on people mentioned in Notebooks as early as 1961--are veterans of the struggles in a cause that--for two of them at least--has come to seem false, a kind of ideological self-delusion that made their idealism and their sense of community appear to be politically important. Piet, the Afrikaner, driven by drought from the farm he loved, found new meaning as a political activist. He still believes that man-made inequities "can be unmade by men" (35), but he is isolated, shunned by his old colleagues, who think he is an informer. There is a kind of stolidity in Piet which allows him to withstand the attacks/demands on him by Gladys and Steve and which incidentally makes him a difficult character for an actor to play. Gladys, in response to a police raid in which her private diaries were read ("They violated me, Peter" [28]), has been in and out of mental hospitals. Even though she knows better (her hysteria frequently breaks through her quiescent mask during the play), she blames Piet for what has happened, for luring her from the safety of her middle-class English home with his siren song, "Trust, Gladys. Trust yourself. Trust life" (27). She not only accuses him, but tries to punish him by destroying the no longer existing closeness between him and Steve, the "coloured" friend whose eloquence brought him into the movement. "There was nothing left to wreck" (77), Piet says. As for Steve, just out of prison and on his way to voluntary exile in England, he has come to Pier because he believes, with the others in their group, that Piet is an informer, and it is a flawed Piet that he needs. The most interesting thing about Steve is the way in which he transfers his own feelings onto Piet, at first attacking him for accusations that Piet never makes about his decision to leave South Africa and then, presumably in search of a fellow sinner, by revealing that he turned informer in prison.

At the end of the play with Steve gone and Gladys inside packing for her return to the hospital, Piet is left alone in the backyard with his collection of aloes. The metaphor of the aloes is explained, perhaps too obviously, in the exchange between him and Gladys in Act One, in which he describes the power of aloes to withstand drought, but the lesson is somewhat ambiguous. "Is that the price of survival in this country?" she asks. "Thorns and bitterness." Those words do not describe the Piet we see in the play, but he does find "some sort of lesson" in aloes, insisting, "We need survival mechanisms as well." The aloes in the play, however, are not "the veritable forest of scarlet spikes" he remembers from the farm, but captive plants, and "An aloe isn't seen to its best advantage in a jam tin in a little backyard." Gladys rejects the survival lesson. "If that's what your expectations have shrunk to, it's your business, but God has not planted me in a jam tin" (15, 14, 16). That she may have a jam tin of her own--her recurring madness--does not alter the validity of her statement. God may not have planted Piet in a jam tin either, but at the end he crawls into one, joins the other potted plants in the backyard. "I wasn't writing about a hero," Fugard told Gussow. "I was writing about a victim. I've never written about a hero. I don't understand heroism. Piet is a very simple man, saying, 'I've lived through one drought. I'll try to survive this one as well'" (90). Of course, he lived through the drought by leaving the land which, in the present context, would be a Steve solution which is impossible for Piet. A positive negative end, then, in the best Fugard tradition.

There are a great many set pieces in Aloes--Piet on aloes, Piet on the drought, Piet on the bus strike and his conversion, Steve on his father's fish and his decay after losing his home, Steve on his prison experience, even Gladys on the diary and the raid. Sometimes these appear to be information-giving speeches, for the audience not the other characters, but at their best they work dramatically. Piet uses his to deflect Gladys's anger, Steve uses his to elicit Piet's presumed complicity, and Gladys's are both weapons against Piet and indications of her increasing instability. Fugard has always used such devices, although at times he seems to disapprove of them. In 1970, commenting on text and subtext, stating versus showing through action, he sees Boesman and Lena as an improvement over The Blood Knot: "Morrie and Zachariah speak out almost all that happens to them, they articulate in detail; Boesman acts."(4) His recurring distrust of The Blood Knot ("That play is well and truly buried. I now only talk about it when I am drunk," he told Notebooks [61] as early as July 1962) surfaced in 1985 when he prepared the text for the twenty-fifth anniversary presentation of the play by cutting extensively, most of it from Morris's speeches. The shearing of Morris aside, Fugard continued to give his characters long speeches whether they were used to set up a context of intimacy ("Master Harold" . . . and the boys), to provide a final character revelation (The Road to Mecca), or as direct address to the audience (My Children! My Africa!). He told Christopher Wren that the latter were not soliloquies but "confidences" (36), speeches to an understanding audience by characters who cannot speak honestly to one another. One of the most attractive uses of this device, particularly to someone whom performance artists have taught to distrust the monologue, comes in A Place with the Pigs, in which the practical Praskovya regularly undercuts the verbal flights of Pavel. At the end of a typically eloquent, angst-ridden, self-dramatizing speech, Pavel cries out, "Is my soul now nothing more than a pigsty?" Praskovya--bless her heart--responds, "That sounds like a theological question, Pavel. I don't think I know enough to take it on" (71). Fugard's ability to make fun of himself in Pigs does not lessen the necessity for, and--in many cases--the excellence of, the arias he lets his characters sing. Considering Gideon in Playland, in a notebook entry for October 1990 (528, this volume), Fugard says, "The desperate need to talk, to tell, to ask for forgiveness." The remark might serve as a comment on all of his characters and on the playwright himself.

"A play gets written when the external specifics of a story run parallel to a very private need to make a personal statement," Fugard told Gussow (48). When his early plays first appeared, it was those external specifics that captured theatre audiences at home and abroad, but the private need was always there to fuel his creativity. In September 1968, talking to himself in the pages of his not yet published notebooks, he indicated that he and his brother Royal were hidden in Morrie and Zach, he and his father in Johnnie and the offstage crippled father in Hello and Goodbye, he and his wife in Boesman and Lena (Notebooks 174). There is something of him in Piet too, the Afrikaner who cannot conceive leaving South Africa, who both understands and does not understand why Steve is going. Fugard, whose passport was withdrawn between 1967 and 1971, and who could have left the country only on a no-return exit permit, said as late as 1990: "I identify passionately with my country, and the thought of any form of exile from it is to me a vision of living death". With "Master Harold" . . . and the boys (1982), the glimpses of Fugard through his characters gave way to something very close to autobiography. He used real names (his childhood nickname Hally, Sam Semela, the St. George's Park Tea Room, and the Jubilee Boarding House) and real relationships--his with Sam, with his mother, with his father. As always with Fugard, the personal elements are manipulated, polished, juggled for the sake of the play. Hally, for instance, is older than Fugard was at the time of the spitting incident, and it is here used dramatically, not as a gratuitous gesture of childish spite. Yet his spitting in Sam's face is presumably the impetus to the play because, whatever else the play is doing, it seems to be an act of penitence, an apology, an attempt to lay a restless ghost. He tells the story in Notebooks, on the occasion of an unexpected call Sam paid on him and his mother: "Don't suppose I will ever deal with the shame that overwhelmed me the second after I had done that" (26). According to Gussow, he wrote a poem that year which ended, "Come sit before me and like someone with Jesus I will wipe my spit out of your eyes" (87); but there is more mea culpa than art in a line like that. Presumably not a cleansing mea culpa, however, for references to the event

continued to surface (for instance, in interviews with Smith and with Collins ["Blood Knot"]). Not until "Master Harold" did he manage to marry the private need to the external specifics, and to pay his debt not only to Sam Semela but to his drunken, crippled father. The play was dedicated to Sam and H.D.F. (Harold David Fugard).

"It's the portrait of the artist as a young fool," Fugard told Gussow (93). Although Sam may be a richer character and certainly the more appealing one to large audiences ("Master Harold" is Fugard's most successful play), his Hally is a remarkable creation, a word-obsessed youth, a child trying to be an adult. "I'm not going to waste my time again arguing with you about the existence of God," he says, rejecting Sam's choice of Jesus in the scene in which they vie to pick a great man. "You know perfectly well I'm an atheist . . . and I've got homework to do" (22). A lovely line, a teetering between man and boy. Elsewhere, he speaks with a comic pretentiousness which he recognizes and uses; when Willie learns that Sam and Hally purposely lost at checkers with him to keep him playing, he complains that they did not play fair, and Hally replies, "It was for your benefit, Mr. Malopo, which is more than being fair. It was an act of self-sacrifice" (28). It is this quality in Hally, as well as the student-teacher combination in Sam, that makes the first part of the play so effective--the education game they play, the memories they share about the old days at the Jubilee and the making of the kite.

The play is nearly structured so that the Hally-Sam-Willie scenes change texture with each phone call, first the threat and then the fact of his father's return from the hospital, a disruptive, demanding event that he dreads. "I love him, Sam," Hally says at the end of the play, and there is no reason we should disbelieve him (the stage direction indicates that the line is spoken with "Great pain" [58]), for the transformations we see in him as a result of the calls--the grown-up reasonableness of his directions to his mother, the fakily cheerful welcome-home to his father, the cruelty in his introduction of the cripple into Sam's ballroom-dancing metaphor--are evidence of the struggle between love for and revulsion toward his father. At the end, when he mistakes what being an adult means, demands that Sam address him as Master Harold, takes on his father's racist vulgarity, he is more obviously the child, but without the charm of the earlier scenes. "He's a little boy, Boet Sam," Willie says, trying to calm Sam after Hally has spit in his face. "Long trousers now, but he's still little boy" (57). Sam has said earlier that if Hally makes him say Master Harold, "I'll never call you anything else again" (54), but he does, just before Hally's final exit. Hally stops but he cannot bring himself to turn and face Sam. Sam's last words to Hally are "All you've got to do is stand up and walk away from it" (60), meaning the metaphorical "Whites Only" bench where Sam could not join him when they were flying the kite long ago. Perhaps Hally's "I don't know" allows a hint of possibility, but Hally cannot take that walk--not now, not here, not onstage. He's like a boy who has climbed too far out on a limb, is afraid to lose face by turning back, and so goes on until the bow breaks. And down will come baby and cradle and all.

There is far too much explanation in "Master Harold" for my taste. "The face you should be spitting in is your father's," Sam explains to Hally, "but you used mine, because you think you're safe inside your fair skin . . . and this time I don't mean just or decent" (56). Although the line triggers Sam's momentary threat of violence, it can be played as part of his attempt to rescue Hally from what he is doing to himself, and his echo of Hally's multiple definitions of fair in the "nigger's arse" (55) exchange contributes to that reading. Yet it has the look of a significant line, the kind that George Kelly used to pull out of his text and print as an indicative epigraph to the published play. There is similar explanatory overkill in the scene in which Sam insists on the importance of ballroom dancing as an escape from an abrasive real world. There is great fun in Sam's metaphorical game and a serious point too. Sam uses it as bait to lure Hally back from his reaction to the first phone call, and when the boy takes Sam's image and runs with it, we see how the two of them work as a family unit. Still, there is a deal of explication muddying the dramatic waters. By contrast, the opening and closing dance sequences are so theatrically effective that they might serve as an illustration of Fugard's early remark, "Only a fraction of my truth is in the words" (Notebooks 171). At the beginning of the play, Sam is in his element as he tries to help awkward Willie master the quickstep, teasing him in the process and finally showing him how a classy dancer does it. At the end, Sam is beaten down by his final scene with Hally; and Willie, who is more sensitive than either Hally or Sam gives him credit for, coaxes Sam into dancing again, even sacrifices his bus fare to the jukebox; and the final image is of the two men dancing together to Sarah Vaughan's recording of "Little Man You've Had a Busy Day." When the play opened in Johannesburg, after its New York premiere, Joseph Lelyveld compared the two Sams--Zakes Mokae in New York and John Kani in Johannesburg. "Mr. Mokae's Sam was a large and complex presence on the stage, self-liberated and expansive. Mr. Kani's Sam is taut and inward, strained when he laughs and never, it seems, unmindful of the tense racial context." I will have to take Lelyveld's description of Kani on faith, but his account of Mokae's performance is accurate enough--and yet not complete. The slightly chubby Mokae, who danced with such grace at the beginning of the play, moved with the same precision at the end, but with leaden reluctance in his steps. "Little man you're crying," the song says, and Vaughan is singing for both Sam and Hally.

When the Fugard-Devenish films opened in New York in 1984, Fugard explained to Samuel G. Freedman that part of his fascination with Eugene Marais lay in "this dark side, this dark parallel to me. There is this addictive nature in my personality. . . . I did reach the point where I had to stand up at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in New York and say, 'My name is Athol Fugard and I am an alcoholic'" ("Fugard" 1). It is not simply that the alcoholic Fugard felt a kinship with the morphine-addicted Marais, but he makes the connection within the script of The Guest itself. The fictional Marais, quoting the real Marais, speaks of "Habitual recourse to the use of a poison to induce a feeling of happiness as a remedy for the pain of consciousness" (105), and I am reminded of Fugard in despair at the way Boesman and Lena is going, "And drinking myself every evening into a wild, maudlin, emotional stupor so as to fool myself that I still feel!" (Notebooks 155). The Marais quotation comes in the scene in which, in the first positive indication of his temporary cure, he finds and rebuilds a still--an event that seems gratuitous compared to his finding the pipit nest for Little Corrie. At the end, as Marais shoots up again, Oom Doors, the farmer who is his host and his keeper, reads from Isaiah 28:7--"The priest and the prophet have erred through strong drink, they are swallowed up of wine, they are out of the way through strong drink" (124, 129n). Not that a provincial filmgoer like me, one who does not understand Afrikaans, would know what Oom Doors was reading without the notes to the printed script. Still, with a whole Bible at his disposal, Fugard chose these verses for the impressive sequence in which the film cuts back and forth between Marais in momentary exhilaration and the Doors family trying to temper their distress and disappointment with a Bible reading.

If The Guest is the only Fugard work to make an obvious allusion to his alcoholism, A Place with the Pigs (1987) is the only one to celebrate his drying out. Pavel begins the play with the hope--even the expectation--that he will be able to leave the pigsty in which he has been hiding, but when this proves impossible and when the excitement of a momentary walk outside ends with his hurrying back into his sanctuary/cage, he declines from the relative fastidiousness of the first scene to complete the filthy identification with the pigs. It is only after his wife has beaten him back into his manhood that he is able to release the pigs, and he and Praskovya can leave the sty. When I first saw the play in a small theatre in Atlanta, it seemed little more than an untidy farce--an unlikely play to come from Fugard. Contemplating it later, coupling the subtitle ("A personal parable") with the frequent references in the mid-1980s to his struggle with drink, made it obvious that, as he said in the New York University speech, "I made a pigsty out of a bottle of Jack Daniel's whisky." There are inescapable revelatory lines in the argument Pavel has with himself in the last scene before he makes his monumental decision to free himself. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I won't do it again," he says in the familiar rhetoric of the alcoholic, but he tramples on his pro-forma apology with "Don't waste our time with promises. We've had them from you before and they've all come to nothing" (93). So finally he acts and off they go to see "the sunrise you missed yesterday" (10), as Praskovya says. A victory for Pavel and, by extension, for Fugard, the man. But what does this mean for Fugard, the playwright?

Fugard was one of the artists interviewed by Samuel G. Freedman in an article on the connection between creativity and instability. After describing the way he worked in pre-AA days, Fugard said, "I had to ask myself, could I still get into my dark side? . . . Maybe my art now will be more about light than dark" ("Inner Torment" 22). The first play he wrote in his new sobriety was The Road to Mecca (1984), and it was a play obsessed by the conflict between darkness and light. Miss Helen is a widow in her sixties who has spent the last fifteen years--since the death of her husband and her turning her back on her church--building her Mecca, a gallery of grotesque statues on her lawn, and filling her house with mirrors and bits of glass designed to catch the light of her many candles. Elsa calls it "your little miracle of light and color" (23). Now, however, she is unable to work, is assailed by darkness ("It's got inside me at last and I can't light candles there" [37]), is suicidal. There is a lot of Fugard in Miss Helen, both in her way of working and in her despair. "It's still only just an idea I'm thinking about," she tells Elsa, explaining why she has not begun work on her moon mosaic. "I have to see them very clearly first" (26). Shades of Dimetos. "This must surely be the darkest night of my soul" (29), she says in a letter to Elsa, who conveniently reads it for us, and such a darkness has often assailed Fugard. There is a painful passage in Notebooks in which he fears "that total extinction of my creativity. Without it I find living a pain I can only describe as intolerable. I have feared for my sanity" (229). There is a remarkable passage in Mel Gussow's New Yorker profile of Fugard--very uncharacteristic of that decorous genre--in which he describes the playwright's turning up at his house, heavy with drink and despair. "Christ, I'm hurting," Fugard cries, and Gussow adds, "He pronounced the word 'hoorting'--it sounded like a wail" (80). The playwright's "dark side" is still in evidence in Miss Helen's pain.

The play is a struggle between Marius, the clergyman, and Elsa, the liberal teacher, both of whom love and want to save Helen, but neither of whom really understands her. For Marius, Helen's art has never been more than an eccentric hobby, and he wants to rescue her from her home, which recently caught fire perhaps not exactly by accident, and tuck her into a cozy, colorless, church-run old-folks home. For Elsa, Helen's art is a revolutionary gesture, an act of defiance to the proprieties of her village, and Helen is "the first truly free spirit I have ever known" (61). Although Helen at first elicited Elsa's help, she finally must defend herself from both of them. "You're not allowing me to say anything," she says to Elsa, and later to Marius, "Please can I talk for a little bit now?" (35, 51). When she finally gets to talk--her last long speech--she is neither Elsa's heroine nor Marius's victim. She does not need rescuing, for she has rescued herself with her vision of Mecca and then, hardly a "free spirit," she is driven by her creativity once idea is replaced by image. "There is more light in you than in all your candles put together," Marius says, retreating, and Elsa later repeats the line (70, 71). At the end, Helen says, "Just as I taught myself how to light candles, and what that means, I must teach myself now how to blow them out . . . and what that means" (75). It is a richly amorphous line, particularly when one knows that the original of Helen did commit suicide. Onstage, however, it is an indication that she has once again taken control of her life, and the positive quality of its delivery is underlined by Elsa, who gets the last line.

Elsa is something of a problem in the play. Like Gladys in Aloes, she has learned the dangers of trust. One can believe her anger and her sense of emptiness, for we see them in the cruelty she visits on Helen even as she tries to save her. Yet, her account of her broken love affair with the married man, of her abortion, even of her meeting with the African woman and baby on the road, lack the dramatic force of Helen's visionary speech. There is more information-giving than life in the motivational background for Elsa's distress. Yet, we have to accept the disappearing lover if we are to recognize the violation of trust for Elsa and its consequences--the aborted baby, who comes somewhat abruptly toward the end of the play even if Elsa's preoccupation with the African baby seems to have been promising some kind of revelation all along. Without Elsa's story there is no substance to the last line in which she reaffirms her love of Helen. Echoing her humorless joke about the father who, to teach his son a lesson, tells him to jump and then does not catch him, Elsa responds to Helen's "What about trust?" with "Open your arms and catch me! I'm going to jump!" (76). I would settle for Helen's line about learning to blow out the candles.

Fugard's two most recent plays--My Children! My Africa! (1989) and Playland (1992)--seem somehow less substantial, less complex than earlier ones. Yet they contain familiar Fugard themes and recognizable South African characters, and I have watched audiences respond to them in ways that suggest that personal identification--not simply sympathy for the unfortunate other--is at work. My Children, which is set in 1984, when the boycotts against African schools were at their strongest, deals more directly with the racial politics of South Africa than is usual with Fugard. In part, the play is about the education of Isabel, the white girl who came to the location to debate and learned to be a friend to both Thami, her opponent in the debate, and Mr. M, the schoolmaster. For the most part, however, she is primarily an observer--if an outspoken one--of the conflict between Mr. M and his star pupil. She and we witness the slow revelation of Thami's distress with the causal paternalism of Mr. M (after asking Isabel to partner Thami in a contest, he says, "I haven't asked him Isabel, and I won't. I will tell him" 24), which Thami sees as an indication of the way in which Bantu Schools serve the white government, and the concomitant disintegration of Mr. M's faith in the power of words, of education to bring about change without violence. Fugard comments that "Mr. M is right. Some of the greatest souls the world has ever known have unlocked the floodgates with the words in that book" (Greene 8). That book is Mr. M's dictionary, which he offers to Thami in their final confrontation and which the young man rejects. Although Fugard prefers words to weapons, the play attempts to remain balanced, to understand all three characters, as their "confidences" indicate.

For the most part the characters seem to operate in separate worlds, ideational and actual, which is presumably one of the main points of the play. Yet the two best scenes are those in which the characters mix or almost mix. There is great exhilaration in the practice session in I.v in which Isabel and Thami make a tennis match of sorts out of the literary information they are accumulating for the contest that will never take place, and--appropriately enough, given the direction the play is taking--the game turns into a political argument over who or what overthrew the statue of Ozymandias. A stronger and more crucial scene is II.iii. Mr. M is alone in his schoolroom, ringing the bell defiantly, while outside his protesting students are ready to punish him, thinking quite rightly that he is an informer. Thami comes to save him, is even willing to lie for him, but he cannot bring himself to admit what he tells Isabel in the next scene ("I also loved him" [75]), and Mr. M, who might let himself be saved if Thami were doing it for him, refuses to accept Thami's supposed motivation, to protect the cause from embarrassment. He runs out to meet the mob: "Do you think I'm frightened of dying?" (70). In the final scene, Isabel goes up to Wapadsberg Pass, where Mr. M had his first vision of what words could do, and assures him that his children can still save his Africa, "The future is still ours, Mr. M" (78). The sentiment is admirable perhaps, but within the context of the play, with Mr. M dead and Thami in exile, it is too self-consciously uplifting. Customarily, Fugardian light only flickers hesitantly through the darkness.

In Playland we are back to the tentative flicker. "Last night Lisa's annual outing in Playland and Happy Valley," he wrote in December 1966. His daughter's Playland may not have been quite as menacing as the one in the new play, but even then he was fascinated by an African attendant ("His eyes--abstracted intensity") and contemplated a play or film in which the attendant does not stop the ride--"Laughter turns to screams. The whites trapped in the Happiness Machine" (Notebooks 145). Gideon may not be trapped by the amusement park in Playland, but its abrasive bright lights and loud music fail to provide the joy--or at least the surcease from sorrow--that he is presumably seeking. The short play consists of the conversations/confrontations between him and Martinus, the park's night watchman, to whom he returns after each disastrous attempt to find fun on the midway. They seem to be complete opposites--the phlegmatic Martinus, the garrulous Gideon--but they share their inability to live among other people in the world. Martinus, who has served time for having killed the white man who raped his intended wife, has made a prison of Playland, in which he sits reliving the murder for which he feels no guilt. Gideon, on the other hand, is awash with guilt for the SWAPO guerrilla fighters he killed during the Border War at the edge of South West Africa (Namibia), and what he wants, it becomes clear as he taunts Martinus, is for the African to punish him. "Forgive me or kill me," says Gideon with typical explicitness in this too explicit play. "That's the only choice you've got" (44). Gideon is wrong, however. Martinus cannot kill him without the motivating hate that fueled his first and only murder, and he insists he does not know how to forgive. In the end, as dawn breaks, they advise one another. Martinus tells Gideon to rebuild the pigeon coop that he and his father once had, and Gideon tells Martinus, who has said he would like to see the pigeons fly as Gideon earlier described them, to "Get out of that little room [where the murder took place] man. Let old Andries spook there by himself tonight." With all that has gone before, this mutual purging is a touch too neat, but--perhaps because confession is cleansing or perhaps because it is the end of the play--"They walk off together" (47).

Once again I seem to have ended a consideration of Fugard on a declining note. It is not a last word by any means. "My essential sense of myself is that of a storyteller," he said at NYU and, after contemplating what Miss Helen's dilemma would mean to him, he concluded, "I hope to die in harness (384, 387, this volume)." As Frank Morgan says in The Wizard of Oz, "That is a horse of another color."

NOTES

1 It is apparently a favorite remark of Fugard's. See for instance Gussow 66, in which the poisonous snake has become more specifically a "critical asp."

2 The entry is not exactly the same in Notebooks 165. Notebook entries vary according to when and how Fugard 'wants to use them. In the introduction to A Lesson from Aloes, for instance, excerpts are identified as 1961 although they appear in Notebooks for 1961, 1965, and 1967.

3 I have not seen the films, although they played briefly in New York in 1984. My remarks are based on the heavily illustrated scripts published by Donker of Johannesburg (the photographs in the Donker edition of Marigolds are credited to Mark Wilby). All citations to these screenplays, however, are to the more accessible one-volume edition recently published by Theatre Communications Group.

4 The quotation comes from Almeda K. Rae's unpublished M.A. thesis, "Dialogue and Characterization in the Plays of Athol Fugard" (U of Pretoria, 1971), excerpted in Gray AF 51.

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